Book reviewers should listen to Saint Luke. "And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise". I have written plenty of needlessly rude reviews and am, as a result, more or less immune to the slings and arrows aimed at my own works (Amazon is a good place to look).

The response from various reviewers to my latest effort, though, has been different. The Serpent's Promise is subtitled The Bible Retold as Science. The reaction by some to that second phrase has been that of a Calvinist to a consecrated wafer: whatever its merits or otherwise, the believers cannot swallow it.

As Sibelius said, "Who ever saw a statue to a critic?" but some of mine deserve at least a brief memorial: "Cue heavenly choir of white-coated lab dwellers chanting the genetic code of DNA ", wrote the Daily Mail. "They are worshipping the Great Beard of Darwin, which looks remarkably like that of God" or, if you prefer, "a recranking of the Darwinist barrel organ – accompanied by the monkey of New Atheism, of course, as it screeches petulantly at religion" (Sunday Times).

In fact, what I was aiming for with my treatment of what I refer to (with "heavy irony") as the Good Book, was to interpret it in part as an attempt to make sense of the physical world, and hence as an ancestor to today's science. What have scientists found out about the origin of life, fate, the great flood, the visions of the prophets, or even religion itself?

The Serpent's Promise tries to answer those questions. It is not an attack on, or a defence of, religion but a journey into Dawkins's Canyon; the yawning and largely unexplored chasm between the faithful and their opposites. It avoids anything incapable of rational explanation: the afterlife, the resurrection, even God himself, for science can neither confirm nor deny notions based on spirituality alone.

My idea ("workshopped to death during a marketing brainstorming session rather than springing from a single human mind" - the Independent) has not proved universally popular: "The trouble with so many scientists, including, I am sorry to see, Emeritus Professor Jones," continued the Daily Mail reviewer, "is that they have no idea why men have always made up myths and parables and allegories and profited by them. They are ways of explaining things that cannot be otherwise expressed … Myths don't need updating".

One theological expert was enraged that I did not mention the "reincarnation" of Christ, while another was shocked that the beautiful verses of the Bible might have a literal meaning: "to criticise the opening line of Psalm 19 – 'The heavens declare the glory of the Lord' – for empty logic is a strangely wooden way of reading poetry" (the New Statesman).

I agree – but surely there is more to the psalms than poetry. No thinking Christian (and there are many) defends the notion that the Earth is 6,000 years old, or that women descend from a male ribcage. To criticise such beliefs is to kick straw men when they are down, and I don't even try. In any case, an account of physics based on the impossibility of walking on water, or a section in chemistry that turns on the reactions that transform it into an alcoholic beverage would make feeble reading indeed.

Is the Good Book really no more than myth, and the heavens no more than a psalmist's celebration of divine power? Surely its verses also reflect an ancient curiosity about the physical nature of what lies around us. Not justastronomy is forbidden territory: "We are asked to believe a number of intellectual contortions including the claim that Genesis was 'the world's first biology textbook'" (the Observer). The origin of life – of plants, animals, sex, human pedigrees, death – not biology?

Adam and Eve are, it seems, models of the loss of purity that comes with knowledge and not, as genetics makes clear, the real ancestors of every man and woman. Another hit: "At the root of Professor Jones's attitude to the leprosy of Leviticus lies a comical misunderstanding. 'Leviticus,' he declares, 'is obsessed with hygiene.' He writes as if the Israelites washed in order to get rid of the germs of a nasty disease. But the Levitical concept of clean and unclean had nothing to do with contagion from germs" (the Spectator).

Yes, fair enough, for in that prescriptive volume we are also told that men must avoid chairs upon which a menstruating woman has sat: and that has nothing to do with sex hormones. But is it no more than a coincidence that – as I suggest – the Levitical concern with infectious disease emerged at the time of the appearance of the first great cities and, with them, the era of epidemics? For the modern churchman, apparently not; it's a sermon about moral spotlessness.

Even the great flood, it seems, has nothing to do with waves. In spite of the geological evidence of repeated inundations in the Bible lands, the waters are irrelevant, for the flood is no more than a parable explaining that the Lord punishes those who are sinful.

Acolytes of the Church of the Holy Metaphor so much despise the fundamentalist view of scripture that they deny that the Bible has any contact at all with the real world. If they do not believe in the literal truth of at least some of its verses, what do they believe? Not, it seems, very much. In their capacious philosophy almost none of the events recorded in the testaments has a connection with the physical universe: instead, from Genesis to Revelation, they are to be read as symbol, allegory, and myth.

I am the last person to comment on whether The Serpent's Promise is any good or not: but even if its "pages are soaked in a reductive contempt" (the Sunday Times again), the response from the faithful has led me to the unexpected conclusion that, atheist as I am, I believe more of the Bible than many Christians do.